Screen Passwords According to
NIST Password Recommendations
in 800-63B

NIST 800-63B recommends checking new passwords against those used in cybercriminal dictionary attacks:

“When processing requests to establish and change memorized secrets, verifiers SHALL compare the prospective secrets against a list that contains values known to be commonly-used, expected, or compromised.”

Why is NIST recommending this new approach?

The NIST password recommendations include this type of screening because it matches the methods used by cybercriminals in modern brute force attacks.

It’s become clear that people, if unchecked, follow very common patterns in password selection. As a result, cybercriminals use lists of common passwords and patterns found in previous breaches to narrow the universe of passwords attempted in their attacks. Guessing passwords becomes easier when the actual set of passwords is predictable.

NIST 800-63B section 5.1.1 explains the objective:

“Memorized secrets (i.e. passwords) need to be of sufficient complexity and secrecy that it would be impractical for an attacker to guess or otherwise discover the correct secret value.”

The NIST recommendation is to screen for commonly used and compromised passwords to prevent people from selecting these easy to guess passwords.

To satisfy this objective, PasswordPing continuously collects compromised passwords and aggregates cracking dictionaries to create a comprehensive blacklist of unsafe passwords. Our list contains over 1.65 billion entries. It includes every word from every Wikipedia article in all languages and every clear text password from over 3,000 data breaches.

While this black list continues to evolve, the rate at which new unique entries are being added has dramatically slowed giving us confidence that we’ve captured a nearly complete universe of the common passwords used by hackers.

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Why is this secure?

This page, and indeed our entire business, exists to help make passwords more secure, not less. While no Internet-connected system can be guaranteed to be impregnable, we keep the risks to an absolute minimum and firmly believe that the risk of unknowingly using compromised passwords is far greater.

Since our database of compromised passwords is far larger than what could be downloaded to the browser, the compromised password check we perform must occur server-side. Thus, it is necessary for us to submit a hashed version of your password to our server. To protect this data from eavesdropping, it is submitted over an SSL connection. The data we pass to our server consists of three unsalted hashes of your password, using the MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 algorithms. While unsalted hashes, especially ones using MD5 and SHA1, are NOT a secure way to store passwords, in this case that isn’t their purpose – SSL is securing the transmitted content, not the hashes. Many of the passwords we find on the web are not plaintext; they are unsalted hashes of the passwords. Since we’re not in the business of cracking password hashes, we need these hashes submitted for more comprehensive lookups. We do not store any of the submitted data. It is not persisted in log files and is kept in memory only long enough to perform the lookup, after which the memory is zeroed out. Our server-side infrastructure is hardened against infiltration using industry standard tools and techniques and is routinely tested and reviewed for soundness.

More Information

This site is for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. Your password will be sent securely to the PasswordPing servers to check if it is compromised. We do not store your password or use it for any other purpose. If you are not comfortable with this, do not enter your real password.

What is this?

Password Check is a free tool that lets you determine not just the strength of a password (how complex it is), but also whether it is known to be compromised. Billions of user passwords have been exposed by hackers on the web and dark web over the years and as a result they are no longer safe to use. So even if your password is very long and complex, and thus very strong, it may still be a bad choice if it appears on this list of compromised passwords. This is what the Password Check tool was designed to tell you and why it is superior to traditional password strength estimators you may find elsewhere on the web.

Why is it needed?

If you are using one of these compromised passwords, it puts you at additional risk, especially if you are using the same password on every site you visit. Cybercriminals rely on the fact that most people reuse the same login credentials on multiple sites.

Why is this secure?

This page, and indeed our entire business, exists to help make passwords more secure, not less. While no Internet-connected system can be guaranteed to be impregnable, we keep the risks to an absolute minimum and firmly believe that the risk of unknowingly using compromised passwords is far greater. Since our database of compromised passwords is far larger than what could be downloaded to the browser, the compromised password check we perform must occur server-side. Thus, it is necessary for us to submit a hashed version of your password to our server. To protect this data from eavesdropping, it is submitted over an SSL connection. The data we pass to our server consists of three unsalted hashes of your password, using the MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 algorithms. While unsalted hashes, especially ones using MD5 and SHA1, are NOT a secure way to store passwords, in this case that isn’t their purpose – SSL is securing the transmitted content, not the hashes. Many of the passwords we find on the web are not plaintext; they are unsalted hashes of the passwords. Since we’re not in the business of cracking password hashes, we need these hashes submitted for more comprehensive lookups. We do not store any of the submitted data. It is not persisted in log files and is kept in memory only long enough to perform the lookup, after which the memory is zeroed out. Our server-side infrastructure is hardened against infiltration using industry standard tools and techniques and is routinely tested and reviewed for soundness.